Posts Tagged ‘plastic’

Simon Jansen, the creator of asciimation and the inventor of (among other things) the world’s first Jet-powered Beer Cooler, has built a lovely steam-powered turntable. In the video above he demos his steam-punk player with “a punk LP. The Sex Pistols – God save the Queen (Victoria obviously).”

As we hear the words “come on baby, light my fire” in a fresh new way, we might recall that it was on this date in 1909 that Leo Baekeland received the first U.S. patents for a thermosetting artificial plastic which he called Bakelite (and which chemists called polyoxybenzylmethylenglycolanhydride)– the first pastic to hold its shape after heating– and gave birth to the modern plastics industry. Because of its heat-resistance and insulating capability, Bakelite was used in all sorts of electrical devices: insulators, telephones, radios… and phonographs.